Franz Liszt doesn’t get the party he merits

Lang Lang’s latest CD, one of many releases celebrating the 200th anniversary of Franz Liszt’s birth on Oct. 22, 1811, is titled “Liszt, My Piano Hero.” Of course Liszt would be a hero of the flamboyant Lang Lang. Liszt was said to have been the greatest keyboard virtuoso the world had ever known -- and the most showy.

An 1842 caricature of the dashing Hungarian at the piano on stage in Berlin shows him as clearly the prototype for the modern rock star. With his left hand on the keys, he is waving to his mostly female audience with his right. The women sway, swoon, drink wine, blush, push close to the stage, fling flowers and examine through opera glasses every inch of the long-haired and leonine Liszt. The atmosphere is as sexually charged as a Beatles concert a century-and-a-quarter later, when a small wave from Paul was all it took to arouse hysterical screams from teenage girls.

Has anyone ever called Liszt the first feminist? Perhaps he was that too. He helped liberate 19th century women by tempting them to flout social convention, making frank public expressions of female sexuality fashionable. “Lisztomania” was the term the German poet Heinrich Heine coined at the time for this mass hysteria. Shocked by such displays, medical men investigated what they believed must be an underlying pathology infecting these ladies.

Lisztomania alone might have provided the classical music community with a terrific opportunity on this anniversary year to add a little context to issues that intrigue and trouble 21st century culture.

But there’s plenty more: Liszt’s calling as a sex idol was but one aspect, and a relatively brief one, of perhaps the most extraordinary career in all music. He retired from the concert stage at 35 and lived 40 more years (which also makes this year the 125th anniversary of his death), devoting himself to composition and eventually the church. The first volume of Alan Walker’s monumental biography of Liszt is titled “The Virtuoso Years: 1811-1847.” Two more incident-packed volumes, nearly another 1,300 pages, follow.

And yet the Liszt year was, if not entirely Liszt-less, certainly listless. It left us with several welcome recordings, for which Christmas shoppers can rejoice. But Liszt’s neglected music, a vast cache of treasures, remains neglected -- including some particularly fine and little-known Christmas music (such as the oratorio “Christus”), which will remain little known this Christmas. Significant Liszt performances were scant in these parts this year, as they were in most places outside of Budapest or Raiding (Liszt’s Hungarian birthplace, now in Austria).

What did turn up, moreover, tended to be the same old, same old. At the Palace of Arts, Budapest’s major concert hall, during the so-called World Liszt Day (the world here being relegated mainly to Eastern Europe), the big event was a concert of his two piano concertos, Liszt chestnuts both.

The usually resourceful Los Angeles Philharmonic all but wrote Liszt off. Summer at the Hollywood Bowl brought the potboiler “Les Preludes.” The Piano Concerto No. 2 is coming up next month. Even Lang Lang let us down. Two weeks after the composer’s 200th birthday, the Chinese pianist relegated Liszt to flashy encores in a Walt Disney Concert Hall recital.

The Philharmonic Society in Orange County did the most locally, bringing in the Canadian pianist Louis Lortie in January to play all three parts of Liszt’s epic piano cycle “Annees de Pelerinage” (Years of Pilgrimage) and inviting Alan Walker to lecture on Liszt. The feisty Jacaranda new and unusual music series in Santa Monica mounted a rare performance of Liszt’s visionary late choral work, “Via Crucis.” The Hungarian organist Laszlo Fassang played Liszt’s way-out “Ad Nos Ad Salutarem” as part of his Disney organ recital at Disney last month.

But that was pretty much it for the Liszt year in Southern California. You would never have known that both Pacific Symphony music director Carl St.Clair and Los Angeles Opera music director James Conlon have made notable recordings of Liszt’s neglected oratorios.

It has, furthermore, been a year without major additions to the Liszt literature, without new Liszt films or documentaries or reissues of old ones. You can seek in vain for domestic DVDs of the classic 1960 “Song Without End” -- in which Dirk Bogarde, looking like a cross between Van Cliburn and Elvis, plays Liszt -- or Ken Russell’s “Lisztomania,” starring Roger Daltrey.

The Mahler and Chopin years (2010 was the respective 150th and 200th anniversaries of their births) were huge. The music world is gearing up the 150th birthdays of Wagner and Verdi in 2013. So why so little Liszt? Could it be precisely because in adding context to the issues that intrigue and trouble 21st century culture, Liszt makes us nervous? He was what we no longer expect to encounter, a blatant showman with substance.

Women fawned over Liszt, as we’ve seen, and he had the kind of scandalous relationships with married women that would have filled supermarket tabloids. But Liszt was also a great composer who grew greater and more prophetic as he grew older. He left behind a mountain of music. He championed the most progressive composers of his day, beginning with Wagner. He anticipated, and inspired, much of what happened in 20th century music, including the breakdown of tonality. Not only did he invent the piano recital, but through his master classes he did more to create the school of modern piano playing than anyone else.

Today’s superstars, on the other hand, tend to do one thing well (or at least attractively), but rarely continue to grow. Beatlemania may have succeeded Lisztomania, but as New Yorker music critic Alex Ross noted of Paul McCartney’s new ballet score, “Ocean’s Kingdom”: “He’s not getting better.”

But if the Liszt year was a bust, the new recordings, even if they miss a lot of intriguing ground, give us at least an idea of what Liszt wrought and why he still matters.

Liszt’s showpieces and his heart-on-sleeve romanticism have long been keyboard opium to young pianists. Happily that tradition hasn’t stopped. Katia Buniatishvili, a scorching young pianist from the Republic of Georgia about whom you can expect to be hearing much more, writes in the notes for her debut recital CD that Liszt was the manifestation of beauty, desire and the battle between the forces of dark and light. Her performance of the big B-Minor Sonata is compellingly expressive.

Lang Lang’s hero-worshiping Liszt disc is full of the expected flamboyance -- he turns to Vladimir Horowitz’s glittery arrangement of the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 15, for instance. But it also includes an exciting performance of the First Piano Concerto, with Valery Gergiev conducting the Vienna Philharmonic.

Predictably, the two piano concertos may be turning up everywhere, but that doesn’t mean they should be discounted. Pierre Boulez and pianist Daniel Barenboim have just recorded them with the Staatskapelle Berlin in performances scrubbed free of all cliche and convention. Old music now glows with brilliant new colors.

Speaking of Boulez, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the most Boulezian of pianists, has recorded his “Liszt Project” on a two-CD set. His illuminating performances demonstrate Liszt’s influence on two centuries’ worth of Liszt influence on the avant-garde -- that includes Wagner, Scriabin, Bartok, Ravel, Messiaen and the contemporary Italian composer Marco Stroppa.

The most virtuosic piano disc of the Liszt year is not Lang Lang’s but Marc-Andre Hamelin’s, which features what may be one of the two or three best B-minor sonatas ever recorded. For eloquence, turn to the Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire’s new Liszt disc, “Harmonies du Soir.”

A glimpse into the Liszt school of piano playing can be found on a fascinating collection of recordings, “Liszt Students Play Liszt.” What is most striking in early 20th century 78 rpm recordings is that there may never have been one right Liszt way. Bernard Stavenhagen and Alfred Reisenauer, both of whom released recordings of Hungarian Rhapsodies in 1905 as “played by the composer,” add all kinds of ornaments and filigrees.

Lang Lang is their descendant. Barenboim is closer to the imaginative and colorful Eugene d’Albert. Aimard possibly takes his cue from the faithful Arthur Friedheim. A photo in the booklet of five of Liszt’s famed students fooling around looks like something from a Marx Brothers movie.

Danna Damrau’s enthralling recording of Liszt lieder will, I hope, restore some of his songs to the repertory. Christian Thielemann has a great live recording of the huge “Faust” Symphony with the Staatskapelle Dresden on DVD. A souvenir of Louis Lortie’s overwhelming Orange County performance of the “Annees de Pelerinage” can be found on a recent two-CD set.

“Liszt: The Collection” is the gift of the season. The best news about this 34-CD limited-edition compendium, released by Deutsche Grammophon and drawn mostly from the German label’s deep catalog, is that it is priced at less than $2 a CD. The second-best news is that it contains a great many classic performances from the likes of pianists Krystian Zimerman and Jorge Bolet and from conductors Giuseppe Sinopoli and Ivan Fischer. Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s performances of the lieder accompanied by Barenboim are reissued here, as is much of the neglected sacred music.

The not-so-good news is that many great works are, nonetheless, missing, notably the piano cycle “Harmonies Poetiques et Relgieuses” and the monumentally mystical oratorio “Christus.” The bad news is that there are no notes and, worse, no texts supplied.

Still, this collection makes a huge amount of Liszt immediately accessible and affordable. It is a good place to get the discussion started about how much Liszt means not just to music but what his example might mean to our celebrity-worshiping society. If 34 excellently chosen CDs don’t do full justice to Liszt, 15 minutes of fame can’t even begin to scratch the surface.

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mark.swed@latimes.com